LiDAR scan
the entire surface of the Earth

Watch the TEDx on the Earth Archive

The climate crisis threatens to destroy our entire cultural & ecological patrimony.

We’ve already lost 50% of the world’s rainforests.
We’re losing 18 million acres of forest each year.
Rising sea levels will make whole cities, countries, and continents unrecognizable.

Unless we have a record of these places, no one in the future will even know they existed.

How it works

LiDAR, Light Detection & Ranging, involves shooting a dense grid of infrared beams from an airplane towards the ground. It’s a high-resolution scan of the earth’s surface & everything on it.

Not an actual image, but a dense three-dimensional cloud of points.

Our Mission

The ultimate goal of the Earth Archive is to create a digital planet as a gift for future generations.

The initiative has three main goals.

Create

Create a baseline record of the earth as it is now for future generations and for use in mitigating on-going destruction of our cultural heritage and environment.

Build

Build a virtual, open-source digital twin of our earth which is accessible to all all, so we can better understand the world as it is today and future generations can use it to rebuild it tomorrow.

Curate

Curate this record in perpetuity for future generations and make it accessible to as many as possible.

A Gift for Future Generations

The Earth Archive is a bet on the future of humankind.

A bet that together, collectively, as people & as scientists, that we will face the climate crisis. And that we’ll choose to do right thing. Not just for us today, but to honor those who came before us, and to pay it forward to future generations who will carry on our legacy.

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LiDAR scan the entire surface of the Earth